– Parenting! Grey turned 10 weeks on Monday and things have definitely gotten better. He cries less often but also seems to be sleeping less often and requires more undivided attention when he’s awake. Still, we count ourselves lucky. He has a very easy going personality and has been affording us a lot of sleep, for which we will richly reward him throughout the rest of his life.

– Reading! I’ve been ripping through graphic novels lately and slowly but surely working through more of my list for my preliminary exam. I just started The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares and I think I’m gonna like it quite a bit. I’ve been rereading and picking at some of the criticism too, and as I read I’m getting a firmer and firmer idea of the questions I will likely be asked regarding magic realism, the fantastic, and science fiction, and (better yet) how I will likely answer them.

– Footie! I’ve watched very little of the Gold Cup, such as it deserves. However I’ve recorded the La Liga season review on GolTV for those bottle feeding moments, and it gets me really, really excited for the upcoming season. I would say, at this moment, if I had to choose between watching the Premier League and La Liga, I’d go the Spanish route. Watching the review show underscored how much I missed it, and how damn good even the bottom teams can play.

– Footie! I’ve been playing in a Monday night league that’s a step down in terms of competitiveness than the Saturday league. It’s still a lot of fun although my feet could probably use a rest. I find that indoor is a lot easier on the soles of my feet due to the flatness of both the shoes I wear and, more importantly, the field. The fields for the Monday night games are in considerably better shape than the ones we play on for the weekend league, yet I can still feel ever divot beneath my cleats.

– Writing! Yes, I’m actually closing in on the final revisions of a 4K-word short story. At present, I think it’s turning out quite well. This one is light on the speculative element so I’m starting with literary markets and I hope (hope hope hope) I get some kind of response, even if it’s just a “well-written but not what we’re looking for.” Anything except the standard rejection slip, please.

– Canoeing! When we’re at my in-laws, the extra help affords me time to get out on the water. I bought a kneeling pad and a crate to use as a saddle for solo paddling and tried it out yesterday with complete success. My paddling skills have improved a lot and I have a good feel for my canoe now, although my experience is limited to me being the only weight and paddling alone on flat water. Still, I can execute a nice J-stroke and can maneuvering the boat pretty much how I want. Someday I’ll need to take a lesson or two to smooth out the rough edges. Quite fun though.

– School! I’m trying to work out some kind of rough plan for the courses I’m teaching this fall. I should also be doing more research for the independent study I’m pitching, but that’s even more work. I’ll get around to it eventually.

That’s it for now. Back to doing one of the above points…

Current Mood: Fine |

In the summer we have a lovely landscaped backyard. In the fall, we have to cut it down. In the spring, we need to lay down mulch. Lots and lots of mulch.

This year I decided to keep the final count on this space: we bought 45 and probably could have used one more. It was 31.5 bags in the back and 13.5 bags in the front. About an hour after we finished the snow started coming down.

As much as I like to complain about the yard projects, we have it down to a science. You gotta get out there well before the green stuff starts popping up and a good fall clean up helps immensely. I also decided to use the city-issued garbage bin as a makeshift wheelbarrow in order to transport the bags from the car to the yard. It definitely helped take the strain off my back.

Well, ’tis done. On to the next project I’m afraid to ask about.

Current Mood: Tired |
Currently Listening To – Son Volt – “The Search”

The last time we attempted a section of the trail, we actually ended up doing 14 miles in a single day rather than stopping at the half-way point because the mosquitoes were so bad. This time, we’re more prepared and will be armed to the teeth with Deep Woods Off! and also those stylish mosquito-net suits you’ve seen people wearing in Paris.

Here’s to hoping that the bugs are tolerable and that my right peg holds up under added weight and mileage. I am bringing War of the Ring just in case disaster strikes and we spend the weekend holed up at my brother’s pad. It’s a great game but it takes about two hours just to set up the board…

Current Mood: Wrapping Up Loose Ends |

They’re selling t-shirts around town for those of us who survived 100+ inches of snow this winter, a winter which has managed to flatten the affect of the entire city. And it’s been a lousy spring thus far. When it’s warm (and by warm I mean in the mid-40s) it has rained like crazy with big wind. When it hasn’t been raining, it’s been cold with wind chill in the 20s. I heard on the news that we’re eleven degrees colder than average for mid-April.

I could live with all of this if I didn’t have this sneaking suspicion that we’re going to have about a week of temperate, spring-like weather before we get 80+ degrees and stifling humidity in May. Spring and Fall are just rumors around here as Winter and Summer boss the place.

Trying to figure out who is getting relegated from the Premier League
Look, a week ago I would have put money on Derby, Fulham, and Bolton going down. That trio is still where the smart money is, but I think it’ll go down to the wire. Wigan, Reading, and Birmingham don’t look safe in the slightest bit after wins by Bolton and Fulham. Fulham are now four points (well, five due to goal difference) from safety. That’s only a couple of wins and they looked pretty damn good against Reading this weekend. Of course, they need the teams above them to stop winning period, but that’s not out of the question.

Things are only slightly clearer at the top as for about 6 minutes on Sunday, Man Ure’s march to the title looked under threat. Happily, the Ars* folded completely and now it’s official: they will not win anything this year. Man Ure have not been their imperious selves as of late, and while it seemed utterly impossible for Chelski to catch them two weeks ago, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Would I bet on it? No, but the point gap is only 3.

Movies
We watched Into the Wild Saturday night and didn’t like it much. I read the book back in 1998 or so and remembered the story more or less, but for some reason I thought the guy was wandering around in the late 70′s early 80′s rather than the early 90′s. My opinion of the man is summed up by the Alaskan park ranger Peter Christian (via WikiPedia):

People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent […] When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament […] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.”

When living in Seattle, I remember being surprised by how infrequently wilderness-related deaths made the news. I listened to a ranger at Mount Baker on NPR saying every year they pulled at least a couple of bodies out of the snow in the backcountry, avalanche victims wearing brand spankin’ new snowboarding gear. One year a ranger told me about a kid who got killed hiking the Olympic Coast because he didn’t have a tide table and presumably got dragged out to sea. The Discovery channel has a show called I Shouldn’t Be Alive, and the common denominator with a lot of these folks is that they’re woefully unprepared.

A lot of media has a profound disrespect for wilderness, possibly because there is so little of it left. The aforementioned deaths are the result of people not understanding that the natural world does not care about you enjoying it. The ironic thing is that with the vast amounts of information available to us (even in the early 90′s) being unprepared is unforgivable. With today’s gear, backpacking is less about a struggle for survival and more about the struggle for comfort, as long as you’re reasonably prepared. Not having a map? That’s just dumb.

Regarding the movie, I mostly objected to the romanticization of the life (though Amy thought the movie made him seem like an idiot.) For instance, there’s nothing carefree about dodging getting a permit to kayak the Colorado in the Grand Canyon. Is there a bureaucracy surrounding that particular stretch of river? Absolutely. But it’s because there is roughly one kajillion people wanting to use it. Permits, while annoying, perform a function. They help regulate the flow of people so we don’t love our few remaining natural resources to death. They also give rangers a chance to tell you what not to do, things like throwing food scraps in the water, which a remarkable number of people do even after being told. Not to mention the whole safety factor. Had McCandless drowned in the Colorado, would they have made a movie about him? Probably not.

The other thing is that McCandless didn’t even put himself in that deadly of a situation in Alaska. Why didn’t he bring a fishing pole? And had he learned to properly learned to cure meat then the moose he shot would have provided him protein for a long, long time.

In the end it’s a sad story but one that doesn’t elicit a lot of sympathy for me. Could I have provided for myself in those same conditions? Probably not, but then again I wouldn’t put myself in that situation without a little prep work. And with that prep work, I think the answer would be: absolutely.

My thirty minutes of procrastination is up. Back to my review of scholarship paper…

Current Mood: Okay |

/
Mother Nature is a hoor. Madison got another 8-10 inches of snow yesterday. Previous record for snowfall? 76.1 inches in 1978-79. This year we’ve had 102. Sick of winter? Yes, thanks.

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Where did break go? Ugh. I really don’t want to go back to school next week.

Current Mood: Tired |

The above is the car in the driveway. Note that the shovel to the right is about four feet tall. That would make that snow bank pushed against the neighbor’s garage about six-and-a-half feet tall. Yesterday, I had to flatten parts of this bank into a shelf so I could drop more snow on it. There simply isn’t anywhere else to put it.

See? Nowhere to put snow. Those mountains on either side of the driveway can’t be built upon without them collapsing. That means the only real option is heaving the snow up and over these walls (which are about 5′ high). You ever try to throw wet, heavy snow over a five-foot wall? Believe me, it gets old fast.

To be clear, I like winter. I like snow. And yes, sometimes I even like those bracing, cold, single-degree days. The problem is that this winter has snowed non-stop and the days in between have been bitterly cold. It’s a bad combination. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to shovel, but I do. Which means it’s bad.

Current Mood: Tired of Shoveling |

This past weekend I decided to break out the skijoring equipment Amy got for me and Athena this Christmas.

Alas, the Bean isn’t very good at it. We’ve put a lot of effort into making sure she doesn’t pull when on walks but now I want her to pull. She’ll do it if she’s chasing a frisbee or if Amy calls her to come, but without artificial stimulus she naturally slows down so she’s out ahead of me, trotting but not pulling.

And the deep snow doesn’t help either. I don’t want to go on established trails because Athena would probably ruin the tracks but breaking trail ain’t easy and I’m not great on x-country skis to begin with. Still, it was nice to get outside for an hour or so and screw around. Saturday didn’t snow, but it was only in the teens temperature wise.

I may have mentioned this, but I’m ready for winter to go away now.

Current Mood: Tired |
Currently Listening To – Oasis – “Be Here Now”

This is more curse than blessing as far as my courses go. This evening’s class in question is a fiction workshop, which means we had nothing to discuss Week 1, we canceled Week 2 because so many people went to the AWP conference, and Week 3 is snowbound? Not good. See, my experience thus far with graduate classes is that nothing gets dropped from the syllabus, ever; if you lose a day for whatever reason, the class “finds” time to make it up somewhere. Extended classes, extra classes, more online work, etc.

K-12, snow days meant an unexpected break. Now, it means a lot more work.

UPDATE: I no sooner posted this when I got an email from the professor saying that regardless of what the university does, we won’t be having class. This (dis)pleases me for all the reasons above.

/
Three weeks in and my classes this semester are awesome. But a ton of work. Lots of reading and lots of assignments. I don’t know even where to begin describing the Visual Narrative class, but we’re moving on from Dada and Surrealism to Oulipo, and our class conversations have been open, thoughtful, and insightful. Looking down the road, I think the rest of the class is going to be just as interesting as this first section.

I think a number of students bailed from the Native American Novel class because it’s a ton of work. I’m also starting to appreciate that my scant background in Native American texts helps a great deal. Before grad school, I had read Silko’s Ceremony, Black Elk Speaks, and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and all with a fairly uncritical eye. As if these sufficiently explained the Native American experience.

After taking last spring’s seminar on Native American Humor and reading authors like Jim Northrup, Tom King, and Gerald Vizenor, I realized the scope of my ignorance. For instance, one big question is “What makes a work Native American?” Most people would probably say that it would be one that’s written by an Indian. A seemingly innocuous answer that spawns a billion questions. How do you define Indian? Does an author who has 1/16th Indian blood count? What if the author has always lived in a big city, never on a reservation? What if the author’s book is a spy thriller set in Europe and doesn’t have any Indian characters? What if the book has nothing to do with a sacred connection to the land or the importance of ceremony? And who decides whether such authors and such books “count” as authentically Native American? Can a white guy write a Native American book? Why or why not? There are no pat answers to any of these.

And of course literature stands at the center of a huge, unresolved cultural debates about how Native Americans are supposed to reconcile the past and strategize for the future. And then there’s the question about the appropriate role of the white academic, like me. And it’s one of those things where I can’t believe all the other students and faculty aren’t as rabidly interested in this subject as I am. Since I find myself seeking out secondary sources even though I don’t have time to read them, all signs point to Native American lit becoming one of my minor areas for my dissertation…

By the way, I’m reading Jim Welch’s Fools Crow for class next week, and it’s awesome. Maybe I’ll blab about that more as I get towards the end, but it’s just awesome.

Current Mood: Watching Snow Accumulate |

I don’t mind snow and I don’t mind shoveling but this year has been a bit much. What makes things worse is that the whole “30mph wind and blowing snow” and “sleeting rain/raining sleet that freezes” kind of weather seems to be happening on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the days I drive between Milwaukee and Madison. Not. Fun.

Yesterday was a prime example. It rained slush and froze by mid-afternoon. Today the city is one big sheet of ice. I almost slipped in the parking lot getting my oil changed this morning because the ice was so clear you couldn’t see it—for the entire parking lot. Crazy.

I would guess that we still have two months of this. Not the right semester to have so much driving, but what’s a guy to do.

Current Mood: Not Pleased |